


Burn Like Falling Stars

by NicoleAnell



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 18:16:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13576239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/pseuds/NicoleAnell
Summary: “This is fate,” the man says, breaking into a too-wide smile. “This is asign. John-”“Yeah, I hear you,” the boy says under his breath. “Somebody died. Tone it down.”Rubicon With Vampires. Written for Memori Week on tumblr, "alternate universe" prompt.





	Burn Like Falling Stars

They took a container of animal blood with them and he already knows it won’t be enough. The drive is long. It’s all desert from here to Jalisco, and they need to make it to a hotel by dawn, curtains closed and Murphy curled under the bed. (It’s buried enough. It’ll do.) He’s been testing the limits of things, how much he can stand in the sun before his throat closes up, or how  _long_  he can go without drinking – he probably won’t die but it fucks with his impulse control and makes him more likely to bite somebody.

And he hates Jaha, but Jaha’s the only person who knows about his… affliction and doesn’t want to murder him. Just wanted to ask him a bunch of questions. He hates Jaha but he’s the one who told him it wasn’t his fault, which – he knew, but it was nice to hear.

They said Jaha met one out in Arizona and came back Different but not bitten. He’d have to get rid of the cross if he was. (How much can he stay in this car, looking at the cross, without his eyes bleeding? It’s been two hours. He’s doing good.) “Why didn’t you stay with them?” is what he’s asking Murphy this time.

“I didn’t want to,” he says, because why would he? They drained him and tortured him and only turned him so he’d be some kind of leverage, a weapon. Why the hell would he go back? (But he did, he doesn’t tell Jaha that. He did once, and they wanted him even less than when he was alive.)

“You could’ve found others.” Jaha is watching the road, it’s black all around. “Different from the ones who… made you. I don’t believe they’re all the same, John.”

“Nah,” he shrugs. “We are.”

“We’ll see,” he says in his smug, knowing priest-voice, with his priest-smile, and Murphy swigs from his cup of animal blood because he would  _really_  like to not bite him in the next five hours.

(Jaha wants him to bite him, probably, but he hasn’t asked that yet. Murphy shivers at the idea of blood-drinking Jaha. He’s not gonna be the one to unleash that on the world.)

“How about some music?” he asks.

“Let me pick it,” says Murphy, so it’s not garbage, and Jaha lets him. He puts something loud and Satanic-sounding on, something he doesn’t even like, and Jaha stops smiling but doesn’t take the offer back. Murphy shuts it off after a while.

————

Emori kneels by the gas station pay phone – this place is so nowhere there are  _goddamn_  pay phones – and conjures up ways to make herself cry. Dead kittens. Dead birds. Dead Otan. Fire at her feet.  She’s got a good, soft stream of tears going on by the time a car arrives. She times herself to stand when the driver gets out, wipe the tracks from her eyes as if she didn’t want to be seen.

“Miss,” the driver says, his partner still stepping out of the car. Dark, tired, graying beard. Something  _off_  in his eyes but he seems harmless, mostly. A savior, not a wolf. She prefers dealing with those, even if the end is harder. “Do you need help?” he asks.

“No,” she sniffles. Don’t rush it all at once. “No, please- I’m fine. Thank you.” Spins quickly in the other direction so they can see her jacket’s torn and one of her heels is gone.

The other passenger approaches her then, younger and pale and handsome in a way and – crap. He’s like her, she knows it immediately, even from the other end of the station. Doesn’t smell blood on him, except in his cup.

_The savior doesn’t know,_  she thinks.  _This one picked him up somewhere and beat me to it._

“We don’t mean any harm,” the older man is saying. “I’m a man of God.” And the other one, the one like her, legit _rolls his eyes_ and she doesn’t try to contain a smirk through her tears. He catches her glance and instantly looks to the ground. Not like he’s blowing his cover, more like an embarrassed puppy.

“We- we don’t, though.” He raises his eyes to her again, something open and sincere there that he doesn’t seem to be faking. “You okay?”

“My brother is dead,” she says, remembering her lines. “They killed him. This group of- I don’t know what they were. They attacked us. I saw their faces…”

The man of God is sold, and if she didn’t know better she’d think the puppy was too. “Let us take you somewhere. Do you have family?”

“I can’t go home. He was my family.” Her voice wavers with emotion again. O is fine, but it’s easier when it feels real. “We were going to cross into Mexico. There’s a town there, a holy place.” She’s improvising, the cross is nagging her. She hopes he doesn’t have follow-up questions.

“This is fate,” the man says, breaking into a too-wide smile. “This is a  _sign._  John-”

“Yeah, I hear you,” the boy says under his breath. “Somebody died. Tone it down.”

She likes them. She takes a step toward the car, and the preacher’s smile drops suddenly.

“Wait,” he says seriously, a hand on her shoulder – she halts herself from grabbing his throat. “You should know. My son, John…” He gestures at definitely-not-his-son, who grimaces at being called that and stares at his own feet again. “He’s afflicted. It’s why we travel at night. Please don’t be afraid.”

Not-his-son John is looking her over, something soft and curious in his eyes. She can’t tell if he’s sensing her. She can’t tell what kind of shit is going on between them.

So she doesn’t know what makes her say it, but she improvises again, covers her bases. “It was two days ago, when they killed my brother,” she says in a shaky voice. “I think someone… hurt me. I woke up here. I feel strange.”

Something sparks in both their eyes, different ways. Man of God actually looks excited. John looks… curious, still. Kind.

————

Murphy sits backwards in the front, legs draped the wrong way over the seat, doesn’t bother strapping himself in. He guesses he doesn’t need to. He wants to look at her and talk to her, this crazy swimming mess of  _she’s pretty_  and  _she’s one of their kind_  in his head. One of  _his_  kind.

And everything she’s been through, sad as she looks, she doesn’t tell him to fuck off and leave her alone. (He would.) He stops feeling like she’s gonna laugh at him if he holds her gaze more than a second. When Jaha starts spouting Bible verses, talking about how there’s acceptance and cures for all evils, he sends her an  _enough_  message with his eyes and she stares back, suppressing a very real smile.  _Let him._

She offers information a little at a time. Her name is Emori. She was from California, way back – this is  _fate_  to Jaha too, that they would meet from opposite sides of the country, finally heading south. “Like you and your son,” she offers.

“I’m not his son,” Murphy says instantly, and she smiles at him, like  _obviously_. But Otan wasn’t her brother either, they just came from the same place. “Garbage people,” is all she says about that. So it was just them, and a cat for a while.

He doesn’t ask much about the attack. He knows what it’s like. It sounds like it was fast for her, at least. (The ones who had him weren’t even hungry, they tied him down for fun, drank a little at a time, and every time he thought he was going to die but it took five whole nights for him to die. He died of dehydration.)

“Don’t, uh,” he stammers. Pull it together. “Don’t be freaked out by this, but you might want to drink it.” He gestures to the cup in his hands. She seems fine right now but he doesn’t want to risk her getting shaky. He can go without for a little while.

She crinkles her nose at the cup. “What is this?”

He inhales sharply. “Blood.”

“What  _kind_  of blood?” she asks, still skeptical, even as the smell brings her fangs out.

“From a deer,” he says. She returns the cup without drinking any. Her teeth are still showing. He gets it. It’s weird the first time.

He realizes his teeth are out too, reflexively. He doesn’t know how they look. He’s always assumed  _bad,_  assumed  _like a demon,_  because that’s how he remembers it looked on other people. But hers are… kind of cute. He’s never known they could look cute. Maybe it’s her size, or that she didn’t want the deer blood, but he can’t imagine cruelty on her.

When Jaha pulls over at a rest stop, Murphy gets in the backseat with her. “Is this okay?” he asks before he gets too comfortable, and she grins. He wishes her fangs were still out. It would look adorable.

“You know, Jaha,” he tells her. “He’s not a bad guy. He just gets weird about the God thing. And I cannot stress enough, I’m not his son. But otherwise-”

“Are you gonna eat him?” she asks suddenly, bluntly. Which - yikes.

“No,” he says quickly. “Jesus.” ( _He wants me to. He’d let me if I had to_.)

She’s studying him. “You have done that, right? Bitten people, not just deer?”

He regrets joining her back here. (No he doesn’t.) Her eyes are piercing into him, all new and innocent at this and he can’t lie to her. Rip the bandaid off, like Jaha calling him  _afflicted_  like he wasn’t standing there. “Yeah,” he tells her flatly. “A couple of people. A few.”

“Strangers? Or did you know them?”

“I knew them enough.”

“And did they die?”

_They deserved it. Most of them did. It’s the closest I felt alive since…_  He clenches his jaw. “Yeah.” He expects horror, instead she just nods. Almost relieved, piecing something together.

An eternity passes, neon gas-station colors flashing into the car, on and off and on. “I haven’t been like this for two days,” she confesses. “I’ve been like this as long as I can remember.” He doesn’t ask why she lied. He still can’t imagine cruelty on her. Just survival.

“How long ago was that?”

“There was a California,” she says carefully. “It wasn’t a state yet. Mexico was bigger.”

She watches his face for something. He’s not scared, he doesn’t get scared anymore, but it’s a lot to take in. “Here I thought I was showing you stuff,” he says with a shy smile.

A flash of playfulness in her eyes. “You are.”

He feels like Jaha, immediately having fifty questions. Some of the same ones. “Why are you alone? Don’t they like… stay together, usually?”

“ _They,_ ” she repeats, amused at something.

“Us.”

“It was only Otan. The rest were…” Bad people. Garbage. That doesn’t seem to change, alive or dead.

Murphy glances inside the store. Jaha’s out of the bathroom and paying for some chips and M&Ms they can humor him by sharing. Emori covers her face for a second, and when she moves out of the shadow, it’s different. A deep, rippling scar down the side, from below her eye to neck. So that’s a thing they can do, maybe only after a hundred years or however long since California was a state.

She takes her other hand out of her sleeve, and it’s thick and claw-shaped. Another illusion, but only because he’s the least perceptive person in the country and thought maybe she was hiding a knife this whole time. He wouldn’t have blamed her for that.

“Neat,” he says. He doesn’t know why she’s showing him this, but it seems like a good sign she doesn’t hate him.

She laughs, more surprised than bitter, then shakes it off. “The hand is how I got the face. It didn’t  _help_ , when they were trying to find us. Get rid of us.”

He raises his neck, not sure if the scar is even still there. Faint, if it is. Not as cool. “They hung me from a bridge,” he says. “It took a while to get down.”

She scoffs, not without sympathy. “Idiots. Most of them at least try stakes.”

“Does that not… work?” It’s something he doesn’t want to test. The bridge is how he found out about the sun, that it fucking hurts but doesn’t kill, at least not right away.

The front door swings open, and Murphy hates that it makes him jump in front of her. His teeth come out, just for a second. He doesn’t get scared anymore.

“You’re getting along,” Jaha says pointlessly. “I brought snacks. And this – for your cup.” He’s got a haphazard, leaking plastic bag, guts and fur dripping out of it. It was a rat, probably. Emori makes a face.

Murphy relaxes. He doesn’t want it mixing with the deer, but likes knowing there’s more. “Hey, Jaha…”  _Check out Emori’s face. Did you know stakes don’t work?_  He sees Emori slink back into a shadow and bury her hand back in her sleeve, and he doesn’t say anything stupid. Instead he just goes, “Thanks. I could’ve done that.”

—–

Emori counts the interstate markers. The dashboard says 4:40 AM and she hopes Otan’s watch is working. Her leg is resting against John’s in the backseat.

Not drinking this late makes her cranky, usually, but every time she sees John looking at her she feels… something else. She wants to kiss him. She remembers he ate a rat and half a bag of M&Ms and wishes she wanted to kiss him less. She wants his fingers to trace down the scar on her face without recoiling.

_He’s lost,_ she thinks. And  _he’s suffered._  He hates people but he’s kindness-starved. She didn’t know what that looked like in other people.

An insane thought keeps crossing her mind, that she could just keep driving with them. They could look for this bullshit holy place, just for John to keep his leg next to hers. But then she thinks of Otan never knowing where she went. She told him  _I’ll be careful_  and  _I can take care of myself_  and it actually pisses her off to let him think she got killed out here. That her sob story attracted one too many wolves instead of saviors. Or maybe she was dumb enough to get in a car with a  _literal priest_ and when he found out what she was, how long she’d been past saving, he set her on fire.

It pisses her off and scares her and she doesn’t want him wondering about it for a hundred years. So instead she closes her eyes and says, “Is there another rest stop coming up? I need to move. Can we stop, please?”

“Yeah,” says John, hesitantly touching her back. “Yeah, of course.”  _You okay?_   "Hey, Jaha, pull over.“

“We need to keep going if we want to get you both inside,” he says. But then: “A quarter mile. We’ll stop for five minutes.”

“That’s fine,” says Emori. “That’ll be fine.”

————

Emori gets out of the car and takes deep breaths, in and out, leaning over on her knees. Murphy follows right behind her. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. Her skin looks paler in the moonlight, colder than it’s even supposed to be. He shouldn’t be scared. He’s a little scared.

“Everything all right?” Jaha calls from further back. It’s smart to stay back there. There’s one other truck around and nobody out this late, and Murphy’s not really watching his surroundings, because Emori is cold.

“We’ll get you something,” Murphy tells her quietly. “It’s okay. Stay here.”  _Not a person. Maybe a person. Not a cat, she likes to pet those._  He’s looking for something he can use to kill when there’s a noise like a shotgun. Somebody drops down from somewhere – the truck, the roof of the truck – and has Jaha on the ground.

“No-!” Murphy says, and instinctively grabs for Emori’s hand, and he hears his wrist  _snap_  a second before the pain hits him and he’s on the pavement.

No, no, no. A man’s voice says, “Don’t fight, preacher,” and there’s something mocking and vicious in it. And then only a little less vicious he says, “Did you hurt my sister?”

Emori’s voice says, “He didn’t touch me. Make it quick.” She doesn’t say  _don’t fight_  to Murphy but he feels it, it feels like she’s pushing her whole body into his back and everything is heavy above him.

He fights anyway. He drags himself enough away from her that the brother’s the one who has to hold him down, and Emori’s eyes light up with fear for a split-second, but she moves to where Jaha is staggering up and puts her hand to his throat.

“ _John,_ ” she says, a trembling violence in her. “Enough.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he’s saying, angry at his desperation. He’s thinking about Jaha dead, or turned, and that’s even worse. “Trust me, you don’t want to.”

“Make it quick,” the brother, not-her-brother echoes. “Or slow, if this one keeps moving.” Murphy stills, doesn’t fully go limp but stops kicking since it’s not helping much.

Emori pauses for an eternity. She says, “Give me the car.”

“No,” Jaha says evenly.

“Fucking  _seriously?_!” Murphy yelps. “Give it to her.”

“He’s right, you don’t want this. Come with us. If I’m wrong, you can kill me here.”

“We’ll kill John,” she says then. And right on cue not-her-brother lifts Murphy off the ground by his hair, and he’s  _strong_. The last time he remembers someone being stronger than him is– not something he wants to think about. “We’ll cut his head off,” Emori is saying. Murphy swallows. That’s what works if the sun and stakes don’t, apparently. “I’m counting to three.”

Jaha tosses the keys to the ground on  _two._

————

The priest doesn’t have anything else to say to them. Looks ashamed, a little bit, and Emori’s not sure if it’s because he hesitated or because he gave in at all.

Otan gives her a look through his charred skin but doesn’t argue with her. He watches her run her hand along the top of the car, like it means something to her, and she can’t explain why but she got the right deal here. She wonders if he’ll mind if she lies in the back sometimes.

Before they leave she takes John’s wrist in her hand, gently, and moves it back into place as easily as she can. He tenses and stifles a moan, won’t give her the satisfaction of anything else.

“It’ll heal once you sleep,” she promises. She forms the words easily, knows she’ll regret not saying it… “Sun’s up in thirty minutes. You want to come with us?”

He glares at her, hard as he can manage, which still kind of looks like a puppy. “You _literally_  just said you’d cut my head off, so no, I’m good.”

It hurts. She doesn’t want it to hurt. It’s just a car. She makes her face a stone. “We could’ve done worse and you know it.”

Otan calls her name, impatient, tense. He worries about her. He won’t take his eyes off John until she comes.

John’s sitting on the ground, holding his wrist straight. She glances at the man of God, raises her voice to him. “I hope you and your son-” she starts to say.

John says, “I killed his son.” The man of God doesn’t flinch.

She has nothing to improvise for that. She touches her hand to his face, the clawed one. Kneels down to his level, and Otan is watching and he worries but she’s fine.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she says softly, truthfully. Not just her part, all of it. The darkness goes out of his face and he looks at her like he’s searching for something, and she can’t imagine what. A soul maybe. He doesn’t know better. “There’s a motel two miles east, and there’s a cemetery. You can walk there before dawn.”

She kisses his cheek and she’s gone.

——–

“What did she say to you?” Jaha says.

“East,” he answers. “Don’t follow me.”

He does anyway – pauses, considers it for a second, but follows him. “You saved my life, John,” he says, in an  _I’m proud of you_  and  _you owe me_  voice all at once, somehow. “And I saved yours.”

He feels hollow. He doesn’t have a life. His cheek is tingling where she kissed him, like it’s the only thing – not warm, exactly, but living.

“Why didn’t you go with them?”

_I don’t know. I should’ve._  “I told you,” he says. “They weren’t any different.”

They don’t talk the rest of the way.

——–

Emori is starving and it’s her own fault for not killing the preacher. Even Otan is mad at her and he had the trucker, but he knows she’s being punished enough for it. They need to find someone, anyone, before the sun comes up. They have a car at least.

“Are you ready?” he says when they see headlights. She nods. “Are you sure?” She rolls her eyes.

He tosses her from the moving car and keeps driving. She lands on the gravel, rolls, bangs her elbows and knees and hears her arm crack at the bone. It’s not hard to make herself cry. Another car skids to a stop in front of her, and a woman gets out, eyes wide and hand over her mouth.

Dead kittens. Dead Otan. Her leg against John’s in the backseat. “Help me,” she sobs, so hard she can barely talk, so hard she can’t quite make herself stop. “My brother is dead. I can’t go home.”


End file.
